Blue to purple hatched drawing of a lion head with a flowing mane inside a lightning bolt, on a textured off-white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head within a lightning bolt

Colour · Flash

A lion's head, with its mane rising in wispy strokes, is set inside a lightning bolt shape that is split across the face. The lion is drawn in fine cross-hatched and stippled lines, with the colour fading from pale blue at the top to deep purple at the bottom. The design is centred on a plain, textured paper background with generous empty space around it.

Lion Lion head Mane Lightning bolt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thunder has been walking the valley since teatime, and you have stopped pretending the greenhouse glass will hold it off. Your grandmother's tomatoes sit in their rows under the lamp, and the paraffin heater ticks as it cools. Ruth from the allotment next door has already sent her boy round with a torch and a message: the lightning is striking the old oak on the ridge, and the whole field smells of scorched sugar.

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You go out anyway, because the cold frames are open and the wind has got under the lids. Halfway down the path the sky splits white, and for a moment every leaf in the garden stands out like a line of ink. Then the light is gone and you can see only the sodden mane of the rhododendron, bending, and a shape at the end of the lawn that is too low and too pale to be a fox.

It is the lion from the stone wall, the one your grandfather carved in the year he stopped speaking and started planting. He never named it. You have always assumed the lightning would take its head off one winter, but instead it stands there with the rain running through its carved hair, its mouth open as if it has just tasted the storm and found it sweet.

You go back to the house for the cold frame bolts. When you return the lion has gone, and on the wet flagstones lies a scatter of blue-white sparks fading into purple, and the tomatoes, every one of them, have turned red overnight.